“All right, Biff,” said he. “I’ll hunt up the manager of the Orpheum right away.”
In his machine he conveyed Biff and the prima donna to the Hotel Spender, and then drove to the Orpheum.
CHAPTER XIX
WITH THE RELUCTANT CONSENT OF AGNES, BOBBY BECOMES A PATRON OF MUSIC
The manager of the Orpheum was a strange evolution. He was a man who had spent a lifetime in the show business, running first a concert hall that “broke into the papers” every Sunday morning with an account of from two to seven fights the night before, then an equally disreputable “burlesque” house, the broad attractions of which appealed to men and boys only. To this, as he made money, he added the cheapest and most blood-curdling melodrama theater in town, then a “regular” house of the second grade. In his career he had endured two divorce cases of the most unattractive sort, and, among quiet and conventional citizens, was supposed to have horns and a barbed tail that snapped sparks where it struck on the pavement. When he first purchased the Orpheum Theater, the most exclusive playhouse of the city, he began to appear in its lobby every night in a dinner-coat or a dress-suit, silk topper and all, with an almost modest diamond stud in his white shirt-front; and ladies, as they came in, asked in awed whispers of their husbands: “Is that Dan Spratt?” Some few who had occasion to meet him went away gasping: “Why, the man seems really nice!” Others of “the profession,” about whom the public never knew, spoke his name with tears of gratitude.
Mr. Spratt, immersed in troubles of his own, scarcely looked up as Bobby entered, and only grunted in greeting.
“Spratt,” began Bobby, who knew the man quite well through “sporting” events engineered by Biff Bates, “the Neapolitan Grand Opera Company is stranded here, and—”
“Where are they?” interrupted Spratt eagerly, all his abstraction gone.
“At the Hotel Larken,” began Bobby again. “I—”
“Have they got their props and scenery?”